Historically, media access control (“MAC”) addresses are composed of a header or manufacturer identifier and a network interface serial number. This ensures a unique MAC addresses were used per port card. When virtual machines became prevalent, vendors making those virtual machines decided to obtain vendor identifiers in order to be used when their orchestrator dynamically created a virtual network interface card.
Today, data forwarding planes are based on subnets or groups of addresses, and the industry is virtualizing large portions of networks, which suggests that most if not all MAC addresses in the future might be virtual MAC addresses. MAC addresses (whether virtual or not), however, have never been used for “controlling” or “steering” traffic over the network layer (i.e., layer 3 of the open systems interconnection (“OSI”) model, which currently uses Internet Protocol (“IP”) address-based or equivalent routing of traffic).
Hence, there is a need for more robust and scalable solutions for implementing virtual platforms within a network, and, in particular embodiments, to methods, systems, apparatuses, and computer software for implementing virtual platform MAC address—based layer 2 and layer 3 network switching.